Posts from — July 2006

They say that “a picture is worth a bunch of words”, but I think that I value words more for memories. I ended up reading through a lot of my old LJ posts while looking for something tonight, and reading my own writing I was able to remember a lot of old stuff really well. Pictures are certainly nice, but they only tell you what you used to look like.

Even random old stuff I find amusing, like the post: “I crossed the path of a dark gray cat twice in one day. I hope that stuff isn’t cumulative.” I’m going to make an effort to post a bit more, since it’s an easy way for people to keep up with me, plus it’s sorta like a time capsule. I even found a comment by Randy Maurizio, of all people!

I also stubled upon this idea from 2004, that may be useful to future exec boards of the 97 (I didn’t use it myself):

One thing I’ve been tossing around in my head is having a “band midterm” that’s just a survey that takes place about 1/3 of the way into the season. The purpose of this would be to give feedback to execs and the board as a whole on how they’re doing, and how they can improve for the remainder of the season. By the time the band final comes, it’s too late for us to fix anything. Communication needs to go both ways.

There were also some quaint things like “I paid $2.10/gal for gas today. Ouch.” (from 2004).

After my tire was punctured and had to be replaced in Summer 2004:

Tim made a good point when we were talking about this. He and I are with cars in the same way most people are about computers. We don’t really know how things work, we just use it and hope it keeps working. We probably do things wrong, and when something goes wrong, we’re unable to help ourselves. If someone who loves cars tells us that some other car is better or something, it doesn’t really matter unless it’s more reliable. Good role-reversal.

And, from the same time period:
“I’ve reached a new low in my life. [...] I dumped the cheese packet (including the packaging) into the boiling water when making macaroni and cheese.”

Finally, Eudora’s prescient comment about a picture from the kitchen at 226:
“Band house never die, they just get new tenants.”
Indeed!

I was in SF pretty much all day today, I’ll write about it tomorrow.

Observation of the day:
Pete Matt:

Looks like Sergey Brin:

This afternoon, John, Jon, Girts and I went on a road tripping expeditionary jaunt through the mountains south of here. Armed only with cameras, a GPS, a laptop, and blind enthusiasm, we headed toward the mountains.

We drove to the mountains south of silicon valley. The roads ascended between farmland and huge tracts of land, with some good views of the valley and mountains along the way.

The driving was pretty difficult since the roads were narrow, took sharp turns, and there were a lot of bikers.

A non-turning stretch of road:

Driving through the forest:

Eventually we headed down the mountains, and into a redwood forest. I was too focused on the road to notice how big the trees around us were at first, but we found a place to park and walked around some trails for a bit.

The view from the road:

Looking up at the trees:

Apparently I’m showing Girts where the tree is:

We decided to head toward the Pacific for some reason. I don’t really remember what the thought process was, but I’m sure it was drenched with indecision.

We made it to the shore, which was enveloped in fog:

As we drove south on the PCH toward Santa Cruz, the fog cleared up, affording better views of the road and shoreline:

Once we were in Santa Cruz, we looked for somewhere to eat. We ended up at a mexican place that was pretty good, and I ordered an Horchata, since Dan Lin had recommended it a while ago, and it was really good. Definitely recommended. We then headed back up north through some oppressive fog, arriving back home without incident.

All pictures in this post thanks to John Mishanski’s Flickr photos.

Yesterday I left work before 10 for the first time in about a week. On my way out, I looked out the window and thought “wow, the moon is bright tonight”, not realizing that the sun had not set. I’ll be leaving earlier for the rest of the week, since I’ll be biking to work, like I did today.

My project has finally made some progress as of this afternoon. It runs “hilariously” slowly: it takes over an hour to process a single letter. But the output is really good, and there’s a lot of optimization that can be done. It’s currently doing search in 400-dimensional space, which sounds pretty cool. I can’t talk about the actual application yet, but hopefully that’ll change by the fall.

A bunch of us in the apartment complex decided to spell out “Google” using our laptops and a long exposure on a camera:

I’m the red O. It came out better than I expected.

From “Great moments in program documentation”:

//returns distance between waypoints in meters (maybe)

If I see one more article on the web or serious email confuse the words LOSE and LOOSE, I’m going to loose my temper!

Print this out if you need a reminder:
LOOSE means not tight
LOSE means a failure to maintain possession

A good way to remember is that loose is typically an adjective (with exceptions like “loose the dogs”), while lose is a verb.

I’ve seen this mistake more than “definately” in recent months, and I think it bothers me more because it’s more subtle and often occurring in serious writings.

Agh, I can’t adjust to this east coast time.. it’s 4:30 and I’m not tired. I was still at work 24 hours ago.

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